Marxism
Marxism is a materialist ideology born from the dialectical traditions of Hegel and formalised by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. (Coming soon) Summary The dialectic method of Hegel allowed Marx and Engels to analyse the social forces driving the modern industrialised world in terms of class groups: the ruling class, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. By reducing the motivations of these groups to this simple, guiding motivator, the economic realities that largely predict future social structures were able to be synthesised with startling accuracy, still relevant many hundreds of years later. However, criticisms of Marxism are mainly focussed on the fact that this approach is 'class reductionist' and is a poor indicator of the individual motivations of any particular individual, particular multiply marginalised people. Criticism Intersectionality has recently emerged as a counter-point to this reductionist approach, allowing for individuals of multiple marginalised identities to be seen as influenced by many intersecting motivations and drivers. Modern Marxists tend to view intersectionality and identity politics at large as anti-Marxist and therefore adversarial, despite the huge wealth of marginalised people who have embraced intersectionality and are empowered by it. "Post-Marxism" is argued in this article to be a reaction to the failure of Marxism and Communism to prevail as an ideology during the 20th Century, and became acquiescent to neo-liberalism. It's criticism's are largely focused on South American issues, but as this was a key ideological battleground in these years, the points have broader relevance: "Most of the arguments of the post-Marxists are based on static and selective observations of contemporary reality and are tied to predetermined conclusions. Having decided that revolutions are out of date, they focus on neo-liberal electoral victories and not on the post-electoral mass protests and general strikes that mobilise large numbers of people in extra-parliamentary activity. They look at the demise of communism in the late 1980s and not to its revival in the mid-1990s. They describe the constraints of the military on electoral politicians without looking at the challenges to the military by the Zapatista guerrillas, the urban rebellions in Caracas, the general strikes in Bolivia. In a word, the possibilists overlook the dynamics of struggles that begin at the sectoral or local level within the electoral parameters of the military and then are propelled upward and beyond those limits by the failures and impotence of the electoral possibilists to satisfy the elementary demands and needs of the people. The possibilists have failed to end the impunity of the military, to pay the back salaries of public employees (the provinces of Argentina) or to end crop destruction of the cocoa farmers (in Bolivia)." Class-reductionist. Materialist. Anglo-centric. (coming soon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpenproletariat (extremely bourgeouis views on lower-class citizens and their potential for class consciousness and subsequent value to socialism) Cultural Marxism Conservatives have used the term 'cultural Marxism' to refer to the perceived toxic social influence Marxist concepts can have on Western patriarchal society and its members. An example perspective is seen in this blog post by the Democratic Labour Party of Australia (a Labour splinter group formed in response to perceived communist influences): "One might have thought that the fall of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s would have abolished the need for the DLP to ever exist again. However, the current controversy surrounding the ‘Safe Schools’ program and the recent suspension of the program’s chief architect and public face Roz Ward, proves that the opposite is in fact true. The program, which is endorsed and financially supported by the Victorian ALP Government as an anti-bullying program, has come under heavy public scrutiny in recent weeks as its content and true intentions have been slowly unearthed. Far from being an anti-bullying program, ‘Safe Schools’ has been found to be stringently ideologically driven in its teaching of a contested and controversial form of gender ideology, and there is now widespread awareness that it has social re-engineering as its ultimate purpose."http://www.dlp.org.au/blog/the-safe-schools-program-communism-and-the-dlp/ Nixon (TW: homophobic slurs, homophobia) "Do you know what happened to the Romes, Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags. The last six. Nero had a public wedding to a boy. Yeah. … You know what happened to the Popes? It’s all right that, po-po-Popes were laying the nuns, that’s been going on for years, centuries, but, when the popes, when the Catholic Church went to hell, in, I don’t know, three or four centuries ago, it was homosexual. And finally it had to be cleaned out. Now, that’s what’s happened to Britain, it happened earlier to France. And let’s look at the strong societies. The Russians. God damn it, they root them out, they don’t let them around at all. You know what I mean? I don’t know what they do with them. … Dope? Do you think the Russians allow dope? Hell no. … You see, homosexuality, dope, immorality in general: These are the enemies of strong societies. That’s why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff, they’re trying to destroy us. …"http://www.csdp.org/research/nixonpot.txt References Category:Politics Category:Philosophy Category:Materialism Category:Marxism Category:Cultural Marxism Category:Economics